Business

New York Tech Companies Struggle to Rebound After Hurricane Sandy

"It was like a war. People were disappearing and you didn't know where they went."

That may sound like hyperbole to some, but for John Pavey, the CTO of The Huffington Post, Hurricane Sandy brought back memories of 9/11. Pavey, who is based in Princeton, N.J., pulled an all-nighter during the storm on Monday night as the AOL news site suffered an unprecedented outage. By Tuesday morning, HuffPo was back up and running even though the ISP responsible — DataGram — wasn't functioning.

On Thursday, DataGram was awaiting the delivery of a generator and had just a "small amount of water" in its basement. A flood in the basement — which houses its fuel tanks and sump pumps — prompted a voluntary shut down on Monday. Like other tech firms, DataGram blogged about its tech woes during and after the storm.

DataGrams' outage also crashed BuzzFeed and Gawker's network of sites. Like HuffPo, BuzzFeed's IT department was up all night scrambling to get the site back online. As detailed in a post on the site, BuzzFeed essentially rebuilt its site using Amazon Cloud Services.

"It was really amazing work," BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith tells Mashable. "Basically our developers rebuilt the whole site overnight on the cloud. One of them had a tree hit his house and kept working through it." Reps from Gawker, which has been using a Tumblr and then a back-up site this week, could not be reached for comment.

While those news sites are probably the most high-profile tech victims of the superstorm, across the New York region, other tech-based businesses large and small were scrambling to get their businesses up and running.

At this point, there's no word on what kind of long-term impact the storm will have on New York's startup scene. Some firms estimate that the damage from Hurricane Sandy could have total cost of around $50 billion. Stephanie Balaouras, an analyst at Forrester Research, said the only parallel that came to mind was the Japanese tsunami in 2011, which cut about one-third of the nation's Internet access at one point. "This is pretty huge," she said.

As analysts and insurers tally the damage, many tech startups were working around the clock and using their blogs and Twitter feeds to vent, inform and often celebrate the fact that they made it through relatively unscathed.

"Our data center will run out of fuel for the backup generators at 10:45 AM ET," Derrick Miller, a member of the tech staff at Fog Creek Data, blogged during the height of the storm. "If the outage will be long, we have plans to move servers elsewhere in New York City, but that could be a long process."

Fog Creek's extraordinary blog detailed in almost real time, the company's efforts to keep things going with diesel-based backup generators. "This is what is powering our Internets now," read one entry showing a pic of a couple of barrels of diesel fuel.

Meanwhile, Shapeways, a 3D printing firm which had just opened a new printing facility in Long Island City in Queens prior to the storm, blogged about its efforts to secure and deploy a generator. "The temporary rollup generator has been secured and is currently en-route to the site," read an entry from "Team Shapeways." "Once the generator arrives, there is still electrical work and testing before finally powering up."

After several days of group texts sent over spotty 3G signals, our team has finally regrouped in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. For now, we’ll be bringing you Branch from two makeshift “offices:” Branch North (top) on New York’s Upper West Side with Josh, Hursh, Libby, Geoff and Julius and Branch East (bottom) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with Cemre, Andrew and Ian.

Another high-profile New York startup, Fab.com, also skimped on the technical blow-by-blow in favor of a more emotional message from CEO Jason Goldberg:

About 1/3 of Fab’s employees are currently without power. The other 2/3’ds of us with power are welcoming those without power into our homes. There’s this beautiful, heart-warming email thread amongst Fab employees called, 'Team Together' where team members with power are offering up their homes. It’s special. We’re a Fab Family.

As I write this 12 Fab team members are huddled around my kitchen table working on out recovery plans and our holiday shops. Hotel Betashop (my couch!) is open tonight too!

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